Sunday, February 28, 2010

Nick Cohen ponders the psychodynamics of Blair Derangement Syndrome

It may be that quoting oneself is a bad habit that ought to be avoided, but sometimes it seems like the most expeditious way to provide the context for a new example of a continuing problem. As I noted back in December 2007:
Here in the US we have had to contend for a decade and a half with the peculiar phenomenon of Clinton Derangement Syndrome--a pervasive, almost obsessive hatred of Bill & Hillary Clinton that seems to have infected large numbers of people toward the right side of the political spectrum (and not only them). That's not to deny that people might have good reasons to disagree with either or both of the Clintons, or even dislike them. But in a great many cases the intensity of this hatred is not just irrational but, I must confess, inexplicable. Of course, the fact that CDS is irrational and often outright delusional (here is one especially ludicrous recent example) does not prevent it from being a significant social fact that has had a real impact on US politics and may do so again.

Over in Great Britain, the equivalent phenomenon among wide swathes of the intelligentsia and sectors of the educated middle classes more generally is Blair Derangement Syndrome. Again, there are serious reasons why people might disagree with Blair's policies and his political style or even condemn them--and let me re-emphasize that point, so no one can claim that I am unaware of it or trying to ignore it. But in many cases these feelings about Blair go beyond serious moral and political criticism and slide over into the realm of pervasive, all-consuming, obsessional, and even hysterical hostility. (Anyone who thinks my adjectives are exaggerated probably hasn't been following journalism and public discourse in Britain very closely for the past several years. And I should add that a few of my own friends, otherwise quite admirable and intelligent people, suffer from BDS in clinically extreme fashion. I am too kind to quote examples even anonymously.)

There are some interesting parallels to the Republican Clinton-hatred of the 1990s here. As Blair survived one scandal and attack after another that were supposed to finish him off, the impotent fury of Blair-haters only increased and became even wilder as they kept asking each new time, with ever-growing frustration and disbelief, "How the hell did he get away with that??!!"
=> Anyone who followed the reactions of the British media, commentariat, and intelligentsia to the recent Chilcot Inquiry on the Iraq war will be aware that the intensity of BDS has scarcely diminished. Far from it. Guardian columnist Martin Kettler, who opposed the 2003 Iraq war at the time and remains quite critical of Blair's judgment on Iraq and other matters, nevertheless felt moved to express some exasperation and dismay about the apparently never-ending tendency "for an angry articulate minority to rage with increasing hysteria at Blair":
To say Blair got the national interest wrong over Iraq, and that Iraq was the pivotal error of his premiership, is true. But to say such things now feels like weirdly perverse understatement. The level of hyperbole has been raised so high, and the level of Blair-hatred is so intense in some quarters, that anyone who says "Yes, but" about Blair and his era struggles to make themselves heard, much less have themselves taken seriously.

Yet heard we should be. And heard we probably still are – by rather more people than some may credit – the further one journeys away from medialand self-absorption and the rantings of parts of the blogosphere, I suspect. Only 29% of voters think Iraq was Blair's fault, said a PoliticsHome poll last night. The issue plays less in the hard-grind Britain that elected Blair and his party three times and that – who knows? – might even elect him again if it had the chance. [....]

I am dismayed by the mistakes of Iraq. But I am glad I do not live in a country that is ruled by the people who seem to want nothing more than to hang Tony Blair from Tyburn tree and hold up his severed head to the howling mob.
(For a few more touches of sanity on these matters, see this piece by John Rentoul and a series of characteristically lucid, sensible, and perceptive posts by Norman Geras on Blair after Chilcot 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8.)

=> Still, Blair Derangement Syndrome remains a social fact that needs to be understood and explained. The British democratic-left journalist Nick Cohen was never much of a fan of Tony Blair--in fact, he was a harsh critic of New Labour and its policies from the start--but he also has a good deal of exasperation and contempt for BDS and its practitioners, and he has an acidly critical insider's perspective on the world of British journalism. That perspective may help explain why, in the piece below, Cohen zeroes in on some of the social-psychological dynamics underlying BDS in such an insightful and illuminating way. This isn't the whole story, but Cohen has clearly caught a significant part of it--or, at least, so it seems to me.
Thirteen years on, it is easy to forget the depth of the media's love for Blair, or recall that New Labour was as much a movement among broadcasters and print journalists as politicians. [....] Like spurned teenage lovers, former Blairites wail that he ravished them and then betrayed them, and that he must pay by suffering every kind of humiliation. [....] The accusation that he was guilty of human error is not good enough. Blair must have lied to Parliament and the country. He must have known that there were no WMD in Iraq but went to war anyway. The result of the almost sexual revulsion behind the campaign against him is that we are now on our fifth inquiry into Iraq. Like the European Union with the Irish electorate, the media class will keep demanding inquiries until they get the right result and find that Blair conspired to steal their virginity. [....]

The peculiar rules of British television add to the adolescent atmosphere. Because they require broadcasters to pretend to be impartial, journalists cannot admit that they made a political misjudgment and analyse their own failings as well as Blair's. You can never ask them why they supported a politician they now damn as wicked, and invite them to explain their mistake. The ideological mistakes and betrayals must be on the other side and on the other side alone because they must maintain the fiction that they are innocents who do not possess political beliefs. Infantilism follows because only children can be the truly innocent victims. Political maturity requires grown men and women to accept responsibility for their choices.

Do not expect the fit of petulance to pass. [....]
No, I'm not holding my breath.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Standpoint
March 2010
No Advocates for the Devil
The BBC and the rest of the media elite will never forgive Blair for betraying them
By Nick Cohen

JW: This is excerpted, but you can click on the title above to read the whole thing.]

In 1997, Peter Horrocks, the then editor of Newsnight and now director of the World Service, told his staff that the hard-hitting journalism of the Tory years should cease now Tony Blair was in power. [....] Thirteen years on, it is easy to forget the depth of the media's love for Blair, or recall that New Labour was as much a movement among broadcasters and print journalists as politicians. Tory columnists and editors abandoned their party to declare their admiration for the inspiring young leader. Greg Dyke and his contemporaries sent profits from the sale of their London Weekend Television shares Blair's way in the form of Labour party donations. [....]

Blair's combination of social and economic liberalism appealed to rich, right-thinking media executives, as did his telegenic charisma. He was the finest political performer they had seen, as I found out in the late 1990s, when Verso, a left-wing publisher, produced a book of my determinedly anti-Blair essays. The hapless designer searched for unflattering pictures of Tony to illustrate the cover, and concluded that they did not exist. [....]

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows in liberal London, you just need to tune in to Andrew Marr. Watching him reduce Alastair Campbell to tears after his appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry last month, I wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the intelligent and principled Blairite I had known in the 1990s. "600,000 people" had died in Iraq, Marr told Campbell, as he made the case for the prosecution, and his battered interviewee did not have the wit to reply that 600,000 people had done nothing of the sort. [....]

Campbell complained that Marr was "settling scores". It was a weak reply, but it captured the element of vindictiveness in today's Blair-baiting. Like spurned teenage lovers, former Blairites wail that he ravished them and then betrayed them, and that he must pay by suffering every kind of humiliation. They cannot accept that Blair made an honourable mistake: knowing that Saddam Hussein had possessed the means and the will to commit genocide in the past, he believed that the dictator continued to possess them in 2003. The accusation that he was guilty of human error is not good enough. Blair must have lied to Parliament and the country. He must have known that there were no WMD in Iraq but went to war anyway. The result of the almost sexual revulsion behind the campaign against him is that we are now on our fifth inquiry into Iraq. Like the European Union with the Irish electorate, the media class will keep demanding inquiries until they get the right result and find that Blair conspired to steal their virginity.

The peculiar rules of British television add to the adolescent atmosphere. Because they require broadcasters to pretend to be impartial, journalists cannot admit that they made a political misjudgment and analyse their own failings as well as Blair's. You can never ask them why they supported a politician they now damn as wicked, and invite them to explain their mistake. The ideological mistakes and betrayals must be on the other side and on the other side alone because they must maintain the fiction that they are innocents who do not possess political beliefs. Infantilism follows because only children can be the truly innocent victims. Political maturity requires grown men and women to accept responsibility for their choices.

Do not expect the fit of petulance to pass. Blair is like Margaret Thatcher now — a politician for whom the broadcasters can never have a good word. In Mo, Channel 4's otherwise excellent drama-documentary on the last years of Mo Mowlam, Blair appeared as a despicable and vain figure who plotted to take the credit for Mowlam's hard work. Channel 4 could not say the British Prime Minister had to get involved in the peace process because the Irish Taoiseach and the American President were already involved. It ignored the realities of international diplomacy and dismissed Blair's achievements because, I suspect, the climate in broadcasting is such that to declare that he was not all bad is like announcing that you have seen the sweet side of a serial killer or possess sympathy for the Devil.

One day, probably about 30 years from now, a cultural historian will go through the political television of our time and wonder why, if Blair was such a palpably evil man, he managed to win so many elections.

Now, THIS would be astonishing - "Gordon Brown on course to win election"?

For the past two years or so, the almost universally accepted conventional wisdom has been that the Labour Party was headed toward a crushing defeat in the next British general election, that Tony Blair's hapless successor Gordon Brown was headed for history's rubbish heap, and that Conservative leader David Cameron would be the next Prime Minister. This consensus among the commentariat and the bulk of the political class was reinforced by consistently depressing poll numbers for the Labour Party and for Brown in particular.

I may have missed some exceptions, but I can remember only a few scattered occasions when anyone seriously questioned this scenario. Back in July 2009 the American political consultant Mark Penn, who once worked for Tony Blair, did suggest that it might be too early to count Brown out:
‘I think Brown is in a situation where he could win,’ said Penn. He noted that, in the US in 1994, ‘65 per cent said they would never vote for Clinton, and yet two years later he won by a virtual landslide’. He added: ‘Voters can and do take a second and even third look at their leaders. Tory leader David Cameron has hit a barrier, and a lot of lapsed ­Labour voters are undecided – they can’t bring themselves to go back to the Conservatives.’ [....[

He added that Brown’s ‘fair deal’ rhetoric could yet work –if he was able to connect it to voter aspirations. ‘He has to have a programme that shows the best days of being a leader are ahead of him, and define what a fair deal means in this economy and in these changing times.’
But most reactions treated this prediction as pathetically unconvincing (and, frankly, Penn's notoriously disastrous record as one of the central players running Hillary Clintion's campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination did not add to his credibility).

=> Well, it may still turn out to be the case that Gordon Brown is about to become political road-kill and the period of New Labour ascendancy that began in 1997 has run its course. But maybe not. A startling new YouGov poll reported by the London Times suggests that, as voters get closer to the point that they actually have to vote, support for the Conservatives is collapsing. The headline of today's article in the Sunday Times is, astonishingly, "Gordon Brown on course to win election":
GORDON BROWN is on course to remain prime minister after the general election as a new Sunday Times poll reveals that Labour is now just two points behind the Tories.

The YouGov survey places David Cameron’s Conservatives on 37%, as against 35% for Labour — the closest gap between the parties in more than two years.

It means Labour is heading for a total of 317 seats, nine short of an overall majority, with the Tories languishing on a total of just 263 MPs [JW: due to the way the two parties' support is distributed unevenly between different Parliamentary districts]. Such an outcome would mean Brown could stay in office and deny Cameron the keys to No 10. [....]

The narrowing of the Conservative lead has been dramatic and rapid. Until January the Tories held close to a 10-point lead. But a week ago a Sunday Times YouGov poll put the gap at six points, suggesting a hung parliament, with the Tories still on course to become the largest party. [....]

The last time the gap between the two main parties came this close and the Tory support was so low was in autumn 2007. That was before Brown’s honeymoon ended with his failure to call a snap general election. The Conservatives went on to peak in May 2008 with a 26-point lead. [....]

Labour will believe it is benefiting from the upturn in the economy. For the first time in a YouGov poll since July 2007, before the financial crisis, people trust Labour more than the Tories to run the economy.
I have no idea whether or not a Labour victory is really a serious prospect, or whether these polling figures turn out to be a temporary blip. But, at least according to the Times, the YouGov poll has a pretty good track record.
YouGov, which began polling after the 2001 election, has developed a reputation for accuracy. Its final Sunday Times poll in 2005 was precisely right, and it accurately predicted Boris Johnson’s victory in the 2008 London mayoral election and the results of last year’s Euro elections.
In case this does turn out to be a complete flash in the pan, you may want to read the Times's analysis of this massive Labour Party surge before that analysis becomes historically irrelevant. See the article HERE. There's also this analysis by Gordon MacMillan at Harry's Place--in case it turns out to be prescient, we should put it on record.

--Jeff Weintraub

The mechanics of Passing the Damn Bill - Further clarifications from Jonathan Bernstein

Guest-posting at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog, Jonathan Bernstein usefully offers some further clarifications on the procedural and tactical complexities that will determine whether or not the Democrats manage to complete the passage of a health care reform bill.

Bernstein's starting-point is a New York Times article, which he read on-line in an early version Saturday, that has now been somewhat amended & improved and is also worth reading. Here are the key points, not precisely in the order Bernstein presents them:

=> First, to flesh out a point I made in one of my own posts yesterday (Sense and nonsense on "reconciliation"):
As Steve Benen has taken to shouting, it's not true that the Democrats are passing health care reform through reconciliation; they're actually planning to pass two separate bills, the main body of health care reform that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve Day, and a second reconciliation "patch" with relatively small modifications in the first bill.

This isn't just semantic; the procedure, which I think everyone agrees is the only viable path, imposes a variety of constraints on the Democrats, and NYT readers deserve to have this explained to them properly. So, for example, it is not really accurate to say that "the new version being pushed by Mr. Obama would strip out the House bill’s abortion restrictions in favor of Senate language that many of them consider unacceptable." What's actually happening is that the House is passing the Senate bill (with the Senate abortion provision), and that changes in the abortion language wouldn't work as part of the second, "patch" legislation because of technical details of how reconciliation works. The same thing is true about the structure of the national exchanges, and other some other provisions -- if it can't be done through reconciliation (because of the way that reconciliation works) then the Democrats are stuck with the Senate version, like it or not. Provisions which can be dealt with in the patch, such as how the bill will be financed, will be changed to a House/Senate compromise.

Perhaps the Times doesn't want to confuse its readers with overly technical descriptions of parliamentary procedure, and I can understand that impulse, but in this case it's impossible to understand why some things are negotiable and some aren't without at least some reference to the rules that are shaping the Democrats' actions.
=> Second, that bit about "abortion language" refers to the Stupak Amendment, added to the House version of the bill at the last moment, which would have the effect of restricting many women's access to insurance plans that cover abortion even if they buy their own insurance. For people concerned with women's reproductive rights, the "compromise" version inserted into the Senate bill at the insistence of Sen. Ben Nelson is still objectionable but not quite so bad (though opinions differ on that point--see this analysis, for example). On the other hand, for flat-out opponents of abortion, the restrictive provisions of the Senate bill are unacceptably weak.

Back in January I sought advice on these matters from a more knowledgeable friend, sociologist Carol Joffe, who cares deeply about the relevant issues and whose expertise in this area is hard to match. (Her most recent book on the subject is Dispatches from the Abortion Wars. She also blogs about health care reform; to get a sense of her basic perspective on those issues, this representative posting would be a good place to start.)

She responded (I share these portions of her response with permission) that in her judgment, "the abortion restrictions in both Stupak amendment and Nelson 'compromise' are both very negative for abortion rights, both symbolically and practically." Nevertheless, taking all factors into account, "I agree with you and the numerous others (Krugman, etc) who say a bill should pass now, even a highly imperfect one. [....] I also believe that even a minimalist bill will improve things for people who currently have no or very inadequate health care. [....] But no one should believe that this is not a very serious setback for abortion rights and access."

=> Third, one implication of the two-step procedure described above helps explain why the Republicans are so nervous about it, and why they are raising such a disingenuous hue and cry about the Democrats' intention to resort (at long last) to the reconciliation option:
Moreover, and to return to one of my larger themes over the last six weeks, the Times should let its readers know that if this moves forward the Senate will only be voting on the reconciliation fix, which is basically all ice cream and no spinach. Which is why the remaining action is all on the House side.
=> But, and this is the fourth point, all that leads up to a central political reality that may yet prove to be the rock on which health care reform founders:
[T]he important unknowns for health care reform are swing voting Democrats in the House of Representatives, not Senators (and not Republicans). There's some excellent reporting in their story, which is headed I guess to the front page of the Sunday Times. This is a hard story to report, I would think. The odds are that the margin of difference is eventually going to be Democratic Members of the House who want the bill to pass, but want to vote against it. The trick for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama is to get enough of those reluctant Dems to actually vote yes.
Stay tuned ... and in the meantime, for further details, see that (amended & improved) article in the NYTimes.

--Jeff Weintraub

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Now, Pass The Damn Bill (#8) - Jonathan Cohn

The alleged bipartisan Health Care Summit on Thursday had various points of interest, but it raised few surprises and, as expected, produced no substantive results. (If you want to watch the two-part C-Span video, you can do so here & here. For a photo gallery, see here) Now that this intermission is out of the way, the real game resumes.

Meanwhile, this episode of political theater was not without some educational value. In his characteristically intelligent post-mortem on Friday (see below), Jonathan Cohn goes straight to the key point:. Although "Thursday's event didn't produce a winner, it was clarifying."
Health care reform, as I've said many times now, is really about achieving three basic goals: Making sure everybody has insurance, making sure coverage is good, and making sure that, over time, medical care will cost less. Thursday's discussion revealed the stark differences between the two parties--not just over how to pursue these goals but also over whether they are even worth pursuing.
(From the other side of the ideological spectrum, the conservative writer Reihan Salam recently made a similar argument--in a manner that I would describe as honest, principled, interesting, and intelligent, though also fallacious and occasionally misleading on the substantive issues--in a piece straightforwardly titled "Screw Bipartisanship".) Cohn elaborates:
Making sure everybody has insurance is primarily a matter of providing access to policies, regardless of medical status, and then guaranteeing that people can pay for them, no matter what their income. The former requires re-engineering the insurance market--in particular, organizing the non-group market into insurance exchanges, through which insurers will sell regular policies at regular prices even to people with pre-existing conditions. The latter requires providing subsidies, based on people's incomes, which in turn requires raising some money.

The Republicans made clear on Thursday they rejected both ideas. Re-engineering the insurance market requires too much government, they said, and providing subsidies requires too much money. [....]

Reform's second goal--making sure everybody's coverage is good--is primarily for the benefit of people who have insurance today. Many of these people have coverage that won't meet their needs, although they may not know it yet. Only when they get sick will they discover that their plans have loopholes, allow for exorbitant out-of-pocket costs, and leave them with little recourse if there are disputes over what's covered. The Democrats propose to fix this by establishing a minimum set of benefits that all plans must cover, limiting the amount of out-of-pocket expenses insurers can pass along, and creating appeals mechanisms for consumers upset about denials.

This approach, too, is one the Republicans rejected on Thursday. Over and over again, Republican representatives and senators said the problem wasn't insufficient regulation. It was too much regulation. [....]

And what about making medical care less expensive? The Democrats' approach is to try a combination of approaches: Eliminating waste, redirecting Medicare payments so that they reward efficiency, altering the tax treatment of insurance, and so on. They admit it will take time and that they are not sure which approaches will work best. But these efforts get at the root causes of rising medical costs--not just profit or administrative inefficiency, but also the tendency towards unnecessary over-treatment.

Republicans in theory should support many of these ideas, but, as usual, they had nothing good to say about them. Instead, they continued to pound the Democrats for cutting Medicare [....]

Instead, the Republicans' great hope for reducing cost lay in de-regulation--which, again, succeeds only by shifting medical expenses back onto the people with medical problems--and malpractice reform--another idea that Democrats support [JW: to be fair, some Democrats] but that, according to CBO, doesn't actually account for that much spending.
Cohn's discussion, which strikes me as clear and fair-minded, is worth reading in full. But this brings us to the bottom line.
The Republicans have their justifications--and, to be fair, if they are convinced government spending and regulation will do more harm than good, then they are right to hold these many views. But it is not as if their alternatives even come close to solving the problems Democrats would. Instead, Republicans seem to believe these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, at least in any manner they would find acceptable.

And this explains the message Republicans delivered over and over again on Thursday: Rip up the bill and start over. That's not a plea for compromise. That's a demand for capitulation. And it frames the choice for Democrats pretty clearly. Either they will act alone, or they will not act at all.
In short, Pass The Damn Bill. Sure, it's not perfect. But overall, and on balance, it takes a substantial step in the right direction. If it didn't, why would the Republicans be opposing it so frantically and monolithically?

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
New Republic (On-Line)
February 26, 2010
Summited Out
The GOP wants capitulation, not compromise

By Jonathan Cohn

Who won? It's the exact same question people asked in 2008, after each of the presidential debates. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. What's "winning"--scoring more debate points, making fewer gaffes, or simply appealing to more voters? And aren't all those judgments pretty subjective anyway?

But if Thursday's event didn't produce a winner, it was clarifying.

Health care reform, as I've said many times now, is really about achieving three basic goals: Making sure everybody has insurance, making sure coverage is good, and making sure that, over time, medical care will cost less. Thursday's discussion revealed the stark differences between the two parties--not just over how to pursue these goals but also over whether they are even worth pursuing.

Making sure everybody has insurance is primarily a matter of providing access to policies, regardless of medical status, and then guaranteeing that people can pay for them, no matter what their income. The former requires re-engineering the insurance market--in particular, organizing the non-group market into insurance exchanges, through which insurers will sell regular policies at regular prices even to people with pre-existing conditions. The latter requires providing subsidies, based on people's incomes, which in turn requires raising some money.

The Republicans made clear on Thursday they rejected both ideas. Re-engineering the insurance market requires too much government, they said, and providing subsidies requires too much money. The best they could offer were "high-risk pools," which would provide thinner coverage--at higher prices--to people who couldn't get insurance on their own. This means expanding coverage to only 3 million people, rather than 30 million, but the Republicans hardly seem to care. When Obama asked Wyoming Senator John Barrasso to speak to the problems of the uninsured, Barrasso responded by saying he wanted to talk about ... the already insured.

Not that Democrats mind talking about the already insured. Reform's second goal--making sure everybody's coverage is good--is primarily for the benefit of people who have insurance today. Many of these people have coverage that won't meet their needs, although they may not know it yet. Only when they get sick will they discover that their plans have loopholes, allow for exorbitant out-of-pocket costs, and leave them with little recourse if there are disputes over what's covered. The Democrats propose to fix this by establishing a minimum set of benefits that all plans must cover, limiting the amount of out-of-pocket expenses insurers can pass along, and creating appeals mechanisms for consumers upset about denials.

This approach, too, is one the Republicans rejected on Thursday. Over and over again, Republican representatives and senators said the problem wasn't insufficient regulation. It was too much regulation. They called for allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines--and allowing small businesses to form associations that would be exempt from existing state regulations. The effect of such changes, as the Congressional Budget Office has noted, would be to erode benefits--to weaken, not strengthen, the protection from medical expenses insurance now provides. Senator Tom Coburn praised this transformation, suggesting the great exposure would turn people into smarter consumers. Well, it might do that. Or it might simply mean people with medical problems face even more onerous financial burdens.

And what about making medical care less expensive? The Democrats' approach is to try a combination of approaches: Eliminating waste, redirecting Medicare payments so that they reward efficiency, altering the tax treatment of insurance, and so on. They admit it will take time and that they are not sure which approaches will work best. But these efforts get at the root causes of rising medical costs--not just profit or administrative inefficiency, but also the tendency towards unnecessary over-treatment.

Republicans in theory should support many of these ideas, but, as usual, they had nothing good to say about them. Instead, they continued to pound the Democrats for cutting Medicare, even though the Democratic reductions are calibrated to make the program more responsive--and even though the Democratic reductions are far smaller than the ones Republicans have championed over the last 15 years (not to mention the ones Representative Paul Ryan still supports).

Instead, the Republicans' great hope for reducing cost lay in de-regulation--which, again, succeeds only by shifting medical expenses back onto the people with medical problems--and malpractice reform--another idea that Democrats support but that, according to CBO, doesn't actually account for that much spending.

The Republicans have their justifications--and, to be fair, if they are convinced government spending and regulation will do more harm than good, then they are right to hold these many views. But it is not as if their alternatives even come close to solving the problems Democrats would. Instead, Republicans seem to believe these problems are fundamentally unsolvable, at least in any manner they would find acceptable.

And this explains the message Republicans delivered over and over again on Thursday: Rip up the bill and start over. That's not a plea for compromise. That's a demand for capitulation. And it frames the choice for Democrats pretty clearly. Either they will act alone, or they will not act at all.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor of The New Republic.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Sense and nonsense on "reconciliation"

The legislative trench warfare of the past year has forced many of us to become more familiar with the arcane rules of the US Senate than we ever expected or desired. It is now clear that the White House and Congressional Democratic leadership are determined to finish passing the health care reform bill after all. And they have also been making it clear, without quite saying so explicitly yet, that if necessary they are prepared to use the procedural device of "budget reconciliation" (allowing majority rule in the Senate) to prevent a Republican filibuster.

Actually--and this is a key point that has received insufficient attention in recent discussions--the idea is not even to pass the bill using the budget reconciliation maneuver, since two fairly-close-but-not-identical versions of the bill have already been passed by both the House and the Senate, with a filibuster-breaking 60 votes in the Senate. To repeat, as you read what follows, bear in mind that a version of the Democrats' health care reform bill has already been passed with 60 votes in the Senate. The plan appears to be to have the House pass the Senate bill, which is procedurally straightforward, and then to use the budget reconciliation device to enact a package of fixes and revisions that will (dare I say it?) reconcile the two bills.

This might not work. But if the Democrats have recovered from their post-Massachusetts panic, and if they exhibit a minimal degree of political courage and competence, it could well happen.

=> Naturally, the Congressional Republicans, the right-wing media echo-chamber, and the Red Blogosphere have been declaring indignantly that such a use of reconciliation would be unprecedented, outrageous, "controversial," "divisive," underhanded, unscrupulous, tyrannical, a "nuclear option," and otherwise outlandish and reprehensible. As usual, a number of pundits and alleged political journalists have been willing to swallow these claims, or at least to treat them as plausible.

Well, there's no reason to pretend that this Republican whining is either surprising or unusual. What else would one expect them to do? But there's also no good reason to take this whining very seriously. As Timothy Noah carefully explained in Slate on Wednesday, it's all hypocritical nonsense.

One might or might not think that using the budget reconciliation procedure to pass major bills is a good idea. But in the real world, there is nothing new, odd, or exceptional about it--especially for Republicans. To take just one example (which Noah, for some reason, fails to highlight sufficiently), do the Republicans expect us to forget that they used reconciliation to push through the Bush tax cuts? On Thursday Ezra Klein clarified the comparison:
This morning, Lamar Alexander said that reconciliation has never been used for anything as big as health-care reform. Health-care reform has a 10-year cost of about $950 billion. The Bush tax cuts, which passed through reconciliation, had a 10-year cost of about $1.8 trillion. [JW: See here.] Lamar Alexander voted for them.
=> Noah's piece is worth reading in full, but here are some highlights:
To Republicans, it's nothing short of dishonorable that President Barack Obama would use the Senate budget reconciliation process (which doesn't allow filibusters) to try to pass health care reform.

"You know, we've witnessed the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gatorade, the special deal for Florida," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Feb. 22 on Fox News. "Now they are suggesting they might use a device which has never been used for this kind of major systemic reform." Sen. Orrin Hatch, R.-Utah, wrote Feb. 23 on USA Today's Web site that the Obama White House is engaged in "an all-out push for the highly partisan 'nuclear option' of reconciliation, special rules to circumvent bipartisan Senate opposition, to jam this bill through Congress. To be clear, this procedure was never contemplated for legislation of this magnitude." Sen. Chuck Grassley, R.-Iowa, said Aug. 23 on CBS News' Face the Nation, "If you have reconciliation, it's a partisan approach." Sen. Olympia Snowe, R.-Me., said much the same in April. "If they exercise that tool," she told the Washington Post, "it's going to be infinitely more difficult to bridge the partisan divide."

But look at the Senate roll call on the conference report for the 1996 welfare reform bill, the most momentous piece of social legislation to become law in the last 20 years [JW: passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and then signed by Bill Clinton]. The bill's formal name was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (italics mine). It was called that because it passed the Senate through budget reconciliation, even though the bill's purpose ("ending welfare as we know it") was only peripherally about trimming the federal budget. Yet McConnell voted for the bill. So did Hatch, Grassley, Snowe, and every other Republican in the Senate. So, for that matter, did most Democrats.
[....]

Reconciliation has been used to raise taxes. It's been used to cut taxes. It was used (by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create COBRA, the program that compels employers to allow departing employees to buy into their health plan for 18 months. COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986 (italics mine), signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. Reconciliation was used several times to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor during the 1990s and the early aughts. It was used (again, by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create in 1997 the beneficial Children's Health Insurance Program and the wasteful privatization experiment known as Medicare Advantage. It's been used repeatedly to set federal policy regarding higher education loans and grants. "It's done almost every Congress," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Feb. 23, "and [Republicans are] the ones that used it more than anyone else." (For a complete list of all reconciliation bills signed into law between 1980 and 2008, click here.) In a Feb. 10 essay for the New England Journal of Medicine [JW: which I discussed here], Henry Aaron, a veteran health policy expert at the Brookings Institution, argued,

Congress created reconciliation procedures to deal with precisely this sort of situation—its failure to implement provisions of the previous budget resolution. The 2009 budget resolution instructed both houses of Congress to enact health care reform. The House and the Senate have passed similar bills. Since both houses have acted but some work remains to be done to align the two bills, using reconciliation to implement the instructions in the budget resolution follows established congressional procedure.
By contrast, it was procedurally more of a stretch in 1996 when the Republican-controlled Congress used the budget reconciliation maneuver to pass a third version of a welfare reform bill, after the first two versions had been vetoed by Clinton.
The Republican leadership became increasingly confident that if it sent a third welfare reform bill to the White House electoral pressures would make it difficult for Clinton (who by now was urging Congress to send him a welfare bill he could sign) to say no yet again. But tempers were still running high and, with 53 Republicans, the Senate remained seven votes shy of a filibuster-proof Senate majority. "As in 1995," [Ron] Haskins writes in Work Over Welfare, "the major advantage of moving the bill as part of reconciliation … was that Senate rules did not allow a reconciliation bill to be filibustered." Reconciliation also helped move the bill along quickly; without it, the Senate might not have achieved final passage before the fall 1996 election season brought major legislative action to a halt.

[....] Today, partisan divisions within Congress are more pronounced, and voter preferences with regard to health reform are less clear. (Its chief provisions are quite popular, but the public is sharply divided over the whole.) The GOP doesn't seem particularly afraid of being perceived as blocking reform, despite efforts by the Obama White House to establish that narrative. That means reconciliation will likely play a more significant role this time out, if a bill is to be passed at all. More significant, yes—but not remotely novel.

=>Even some TV "journalists" seem to be able to get this basic point. It was summed up briskly by Norah O'Donnell of MSNBC (who noted, for the sake of balance, that Republicans aren't always the only ones who say misleading or implausible things on this subject).



=> Lately the Republicans have been threatening that, if the Democrats have the temerity to use this characteristically Republican procedural device to pass the health care reform bill, then Congressional Republicans will abandon all restraint and escalate their campaign of all-out obstructionism to an even higher level. We may soon get a chance to see what they can do.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

Anthony Wiener sounds off on health care, Republicans, and the insurance industry ...

... and Rachel Maddow usefully spells out the analysis.

--Jeff Weintraub

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

A crack in Republican party discipline?

The story of the job-creation bill that just passed its first major hurdle in the Senate may offer some clues to the dynamics of upcoming political struggles in the US Congress. Or it may not, but the possible implications may at least be worth some speculation.

In another welcome sign that the Senate Democrats have decided to stop being played for patsies, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scrapped a "bipartisan" absurdity being negotiated by the ever-accommodating Max Baucus--a characteristically tawdry hodgepodge loaded down with assorted bits of pork and corporate welfare that, in the end, most Republicans still would have voted against anyway, while taking credit for any money spent in their own state--and introduced a stripped-down, focused $15 billion job-creation bill. Essentially, he put it on the table and dared the Republicans to vote against it.
It had been uncertain earlier in the day whether any Republicans would help Democrats reach 60 votes and overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. With Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) out of the Senate after being diagnosed with stomach cancer, Democrats needed at least two Republican votes to overcome a GOP filibuster threat.

"Work with us on this," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said moments before the vote. "Show us you're serious about legislating."

Reid also warned Republicans: Fail to support this bill, and the minority would "confirm their reputation as the 'Party of No.'"
In Monday's vote, the Republicans cracked:
Five Republicans joined Democrats in a key cloture vote moments ago, allowing debate on a jobs package to move forward. After overcoming this hurdle, debate on the bill can begin.

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) broke with his party and voted with the Democrats. So did Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Kit Bond (R-MO) and George Voinovich (R-OH).

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) was the only Democrat to break with his party.

The final vote tally was 62-30.
What's most interesting about this particular bill isn't its substance. Given the scale of the economic problems facing the country, this initiative was so small-scale it could be seen as at most a first step, or even as primarily a symbolic gesture. One can also make intellectually respectable arguments about whether or not payroll-tax breaks for firms that hire new employees, a central feature of the bill, are an especially effective incentive.

But in the present context all that is actually of secondary importance. The more significant fact is that, in this case, the Republicans were unable to maintain what has so far been a remarkably effective strategy of all-out monolithic obstructionism--in which they have filibustered even measures they otherwise support for the sake of clogging and sabotaging the legislative process.

I think we can assume that the Republican Senators who broke ranks on this vote did so with the tacit acquiescence of the Republican leadership, which is illuminating in itself. They were willing to force a cloture vote, which they now do routinely for anything the Democrats propose, but they weren't quite willing to force every Republican Senator to vote to kill a job-creation bill. Nevertheless, it's still intriguing to consider which Republican Senators broke ranks, and where they come from.

In a way, Kit Bond of Missouri almost doesn't count, since all accounts I have read make it clear that he voted for cloture only after it became apparent that it would pass anyway. That leaves four Republican Senators who voted in favor, and I suspect it's not accidental that three of those four come from New England. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, all the Republican Senators from New England states except New Hampshire's Judd Gregg (who, perhaps coincidentally, has announced that he's not running for re-election) voted for cloture. And those included, very conspicuously, the new Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown. My guess is that Brown is saving up his obstructionist votes for the health care reform bill. But he has probably calculated, whatever his Tea Party fans may hope, that a party-line "Party of No" Republican can't survive in Massachusetts.

Was this vote just an isolated blip, after which the Congressional Republicans will be able to return to monolithic obstructionism on other issues? Or was this a significant straw in the wind? We'll see.

--Jeff Weintraub

UPDATE 2/24/2010: Here's a follow-up that helps illuminate how the Congressional Republicans' strategy of routine and pervasive obstructionism works in practice:
On Monday, the Senate voted for cloture on the Democratic jobs bill, 62-30. Today, they passed the bill itself in a vote of 70-28.

That means eight senators who voted against cloture (or were absent, which in a cloture vote is the same as a no vote) vote for the bill itself. All of them are Republicans.

The switchers who voted no on cloture but yes today:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
James Inhofe (R-OK)
George LeMieux (R-FL)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Roger Wicker (R-MS)

And those who were absent Monday but voted yes today:

Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Richard Burr (R-NC)
This is not unusual. The current political reality is that Republican Senators routinely vote to filibuster bills that they then vote to pass once the Democrats have managed to overcome the filibuster. (Meanwhile, of course, the whole process has been delayed.) For further explanation, I refer readers to my earlier post on Why "bipartisanship" won't work - Facing the underlying reality, which includes this bit from an analyst quoted by James Fallows:
A closely related development fascinates and infuriates me, partly re the GOP and partly re the press. In the Senate, the GOP votes against cloture. But when the Dems finally manage to get the 60 votes, lots of GOP senators typically vote for the bill on final passage. "What's up with THAT?" I've asked several times. In the past, if you opposed a bill getting to a vote on the floor, typically (admittedly not always) you would also oppose it IN the vote on the floor. That was the only reason to oppose it getting to the floor - because you opposed it! The answer, I've been told several times (by Democratic staffers, who don't seem at all surprised or perturbed), is that a lot of Republicans don't want to be on record as voting against a bill they believe the public or their constituents favor. Huh? Trying to kill it without a vote is somehow safe politically, but voting against it on final passage is not?
And Senate Republicans even filibuster bills that they genuinely support, and which it should be political poison to obstruct, like the defense appropriations bill in December 2009. So the real question is, why do they get away with all this?
Now that, I submit, is an anomaly the blame for which we can lay at the feet of the much-diminished news media, and the shortcomings of the Senate Democrats.
Right.

Health care reform - The White House looks serious

After Republican Scott Brown won the Senate race in Massachusetts and many of the Congressional Democrats went into a panic, it was unclear for a while whether the Obama White House was giving up on passing a health care reform bill, or whether they were going to make a make a serious push to get some version of the existing Democratic package across the finish line. Well, that question now seems to be answered. They seem determined to Pass The Damn Bill after all--and, if the Republicans try to filibuster it to death, to use the procedural device of "reconciliation" (allowing majority rule in the Senate) to push it through.

That's the word from Greg Sargent (see below), whose political reporting is generally well-sourced and reliable. This is significant, because the threat to get around the filibuster by using reconciliation is a sign that they're really serious. As Sargent remarks, it involves "essentially daring Republicans to try to block reform." It also challenges wavering Congressional Democrats to come off the fence and decide which side they're on. And after an entire year in which the Democrats, unaccountably, let the Congressional Republicans get away with a strategy of unremitting and monolithic obstructionism while making barely a peep about it, over the past several weeks a public-relations offensive highlighting the Republicans' unprecedented abuse of the filibuster has helped to set the stage for a confrontation.

Whether or not this will work remains to be seen. There may be some high-stakes political drama coming up.

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Marc Ambinder's Politics blog
February 22 2010
White House: If GOP Filibusters, We'll Pass Health Reform Via Reconciliation

The game of chicken commenceth -- right now.

In the course of unveiling Obama's new health reform proposal on a conference call with reporters this morning, White House advisers made it clearer than ever before: If the GOP filibusters health reform, Dems will move forward on their own and pass it via reconciliation.

The assertion, which is likely to spark an angry response from GOP leaders, ups the stakes in advance of the summit by essentially daring Republicans to try to block reform.

"The President expects and believes the American people deserve an up or down vote on health reform," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said on the call.

Pfeiffer said no decision had been made how to proceed, pending the outcome of the summit. But he added that Obama's proposal is designed to have "maximum flexibility to ensure that we can get an up or down vote if the opposition decides to take the extraordinary step of filibustering health reform."

Monday, February 22, 2010

Petraeus draws the line on torture (again)

In May 2007, when David Petraeus was the US commander in Iraq, he issued an open letter to American soldiers in Iraq that unambiguously rejected the use of torture. To quote from Tom Ricks's report in the Washington Post:
The top U.S. commander in Iraq admonished his troops regarding the results of an Army survey that found that many U.S military personnel there are willing to tolerate some torture of suspects and unwilling to report abuse by comrades.

"This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we -- not our enemies -- occupy the moral high ground," Army Gen. David H. Petraeus wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site.

He rejected the argument that torture is sometimes needed to quickly obtain crucial information. "Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary," he stated. [....]
As Norman Geras observed at the time, "this is a statement that should have been made a lot earlier." The fact that it hadn't been, and that a principled condemnation of torture required such a forceful restatement as late as 2007, was one more testimony to the shameful, destructive, and demoralizing effects of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld era.

Well, Bush is no longer President, but Cheney and too many other Republicans have continued to advocate, defend, or excuse torture. So Petraeus has done us all a service by drawing this line once again.

--Jeff Weintraub

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

How horrible is Uganda's proposed anti-homosexuality law? (Rob Tisinai)

Rob Tisinai spells it out clearly and systematically on his Waking Up Now blog. Follow him through the whole explanation, since one needs to get the overall picture to fully grasp how socially poisonous and morally appalling this venture into sexual Stalinism really is.

If you want to get more information about this proposed law and its implications, following the links at the end of Rob Tisinai's post would be a good way to start. (Also see the condemnations of this measure by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, US Evangelical Minister Rick Warren, and Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton. Two good NPR reports are accessible here & here. Rachel Maddow has done a series of hard-hitting and illuminating reports on this subject, including here & here.)

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Rob Tisinai (Waking Up Now)
February 16, 2010
Uganda's Kill-Everyone Law: A Video Tour

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know Uganda’s anti-gay bill is far more lethal than we’re being told. You don’t even have to be gay or have gay sex to be put to death. I haven’t seen anyone else report on this, and I’ve been called a liar for saying it.

So here’s a video tour of the bill. I can’t make it any plainer than that.



UPDATE: Reader Chris has suggested I add some links, which is a really good idea.

Feel free to add others in the comments section.

Is the Obama White House starting to play hardball on health care reform?

There is some evidence that it is, not least in some of the preliminary leaks about the comprehensive proposal Obama is about to put on the table. As Mark Kleiman put it yesterday:
Barack Obama is going to give Republicans a chance to vote for huge increases in health insurance premiums. Good luck with that, fellas.
We'll see how this works out.

--Jeff Weintraub

Obvious but important & contested fact of the day — Increased nuclear proliferation is not a good idea, especially in the Middle East

Fred Kaplan explains some of the reasons why. In the process, he responds to and refutes several types of argument to the contrary.

One of the more bizarre arguments along these lines, recently put forward in a New York Times op-ed by a defense analyst named Adam Lowther, suggested that an Iranian bomb might actually serve US interests because it would frighten Arab governments into seeking greater protection from the US. This would supposedly lead them to be more deferential toward US concerns, and the US could pressure them into undertaking beneficial shifts in their domestic and foreign policies. Kaplan tactfully describes this as "one of the nuttiest op-ed pieces ever published in a major American newspaper."

But there are also more mainstream arguments, informed by self-styled "realist" perspectives, to the effect that nuclear proliferation would pose no threat because mutual deterrence would automatically produce a stable balance-of-terror system. Frankly, I think Kaplan concedes more to these kinds of arguments than he should. But he does zero in convincingly on a crucial point: Just because the two-party nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union didn't produce a civilization-ending nuclear war (and there were some scary near-misses people now like to forget), it doesn't follow that we'd see the same result in a messier multi-party situation with nuclear weapons in the hands of numerous inefficient, insecure, potentially unstable, and in some cases internally fragmented regimes wedged together in one of the most dangerous and volatile regions in the world.

Viewing such a situation complacently is not "realism" but something closer to what C. Wright Mills once labeled "crackpot realism." Instead, it's long past time for the alleged international community to start getting serious about nuclear proliferation.

With respect to Iran, Kaplan properly concludes:
In short, it's worth going to some trouble to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands. The question is, how much trouble?
That opens up a different discussion, involving a range of complicated and difficult dilemmas. Toward the end of his piece, Kaplan offers some intelligent but inconclusive reflections on those issues, with which readers can agree or disagree to a greater or lesser extent. But the crucial starting-point for any such discussion has to be the recognition that we do face dangerous and potentially tragic dilemmas here.

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Slate
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Should We Stop Worrying and Love the Iranian Bomb?
Debunking the nutty theory that Iranian nukes are a good thing

By Fred Kaplan

Iran's announcement of an advance in its uranium-enrichment program—and thus a potential step closer to an A-bomb—has sparked four responses in various opinion pages:
  1. It's time to attack Iran now, before it's too late.
  2. It's time to rally the world to impose sanctions on Iran now, before it's too late.
  3. It's time to engage Iran in diplomacy now, before it's too late.
  4. Relax: An Iranian A-bomb is not a big danger, and, in fact, it might help stabilize the Middle East.
There are problems with all four arguments, but let's deal with the last one first, since, if it's true that we can stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb (to paraphrase Kubrick and Southern), the rest is moot.

The most recent sampling from this school of thought is an op-ed published in the Feb. 10 New York Times by Adam Lowther, a defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute. Lowther argues that an Iranian bomb might be beneficial to U.S. interests: The Saudis and Egyptians would want us to protect them by pledging to retaliate against Iran if Iran attacks Saudi Arabia or Egypt; in exchange for this guarantee, we could insist that they institute massive economic and democratic reforms and make peace with Israel. Furthermore, Lowther claims, the Palestinians would also rush to make peace, because the radioactive fallout from an Iranian attack on Jerusalem would kill them, too.

This is one of the nuttiest op-ed pieces ever published in a major American newspaper. Brief rebuttal: No American president is going to treat an attack on Cairo or Riyadh as an attack on the United States. Even if a president said he would, no Egyptian or Saudi leader would believe him. Even if they did believe him, they'd assume that the United States was doing this for its own interests; they'd see no need to adopt democracy and capitalism or to snuggle with Israel; certainly, they wouldn't agree to any such deal. The argument is delusional from start to finish.

There are smarter people—"international realists" such as Kenneth Waltz of Columbia University and Barry Posen of MIT—who make a more limited argument: that, if Iran built A-bombs, it could be deterred from using them by a credible threat of retaliation from the United States, Israel, or Arab countries that might build their own atomic arsenals in response. Some argue that a Middle East arms race, in this sense, might stabilize tensions, as each power would deter the others from a nuclear attack. Some also argue that revolutionary regimes have tended to moderate their behavior once A-bombs enter the equation. Knowing that wars can escalate, they have an interest in tamping down conflicts before they start.

This argument has some validity. If they hadn't possessed the bomb, China and the Soviet Union probably would have gone to war with each other in the late 1960s; border clashes between East and West Germany might have erupted at some point during the Cold War; India and Pakistan might have fought more intensely in the past decade. The bomb has reduced the likelihood of major war between large powers.

However, it hasn't eliminated the possibility. Moscow and Washington came very close to nuclear war at least twice. During the 1961 Berlin crisis, the Pentagon drew up highly specific plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. On the final day of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, all of President John F. Kennedy's advisers, civilian and military, urged him to attack the Soviet missile sites. (JFK and Nikita Khrushchev ended the crisis by striking a secret deal.) If the U.S. Strategic Air Command had possessed independent control of the atomic arsenal during those crises or at any other tense moments in the 1950s or early '60s (when Gens. Curtis LeMay and Thomas Power were SAC chiefs), bombs almost certainly would have been dropped on the Soviet Union at some point. Perhaps the same can be said of the Soviet general staff dropping bombs on the United States.

During the Berlin and Cuban crises, U.S. and Soviet leaders had time to think the problem through; and the president and the premier had control over the bomb's use. Over the decades, both sides took costly steps to make their weapons less vulnerable to attack (putting the missiles in underground concrete silos or on submarines or in bombers that could take off from runways on short notice). They also devised technologies—permissive action links, go codes, and redundant command-control links—that minimized the chance of accidental or unauthorized launches. All the other nations that subsequently built nuclear arsenals (Britain, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan) adopted similar systems, in some cases with U.S. assistance. (North Korea may be another story, but it doesn't have a usable nuclear weapon—yet.)

This is where the realist's case for insouciance about an Iranian bomb falls apart. If the Iranians do manage to build some A-bombs, it's not at all certain—in fact, it's probably unlikely—that they will institute these same elaborate control devices. Especially given the schisms within the regime, we don't know who will have—or grab—the power to use them. (If it's the Revolutionary Guard, that's bad news.)

And if an Iranian bomb incites other powers in the region to build their own bombs for deterrence, that may "stabilize" tensions—by giving everyone a "deterrent"—though, more likely, it will make things worse. The other regimes probably won't have control devices, either, at least not at first. There's also the geographic factor: These countries are very close to one another; a nuclear-armed missile's flight time, from launcher to target, is a few minutes. In the event of a crisis, one nation's leader might launch a first strike to pre-empt an anticipated first strike by some other nation's leader. (If U.S. and Russian borders were only 100 miles apart, it's doubtful we could have survived the Cold War without a "nuclear exchange." [JW: Technically, Siberia and Alaska are pretty close. But Kaplan's point holds in terms of the distance between the Soviet heartland and the continental US, which is the most relevant consideration.] This is one reason, by the way, that Soviet missiles in Cuba, and U.S. missiles in Turkey, were viewed with such alarm.)

On another level, the danger of an Iranian bomb isn't that Tehran's mullahs will wake up one day and nuke Jerusalem. They must know that they'd face annihilating retaliation. Deterrence does work on that basic level, at least against a regime with an instinct for self-preservation (and the Iranian leaders do have that). The danger, or one danger, is that nuclear weapons embolden their possessors to take risks, especially at committing lower levels of aggression. For instance, if Saddam Hussein had built some nukes before invading Kuwait in 1990, it would have been much harder for President George H.W. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, to rally such a vast coalition—or, perhaps, any coalition at all—to push him back. During that war, Baker also declared that the United States would view a chemical or biological attack against Israel as identical to a nuclear attack against the United States and would respond accordingly. That declaration might have been less credible if Saddam had had his own nukes to bargain with.

This is not to say that a nuclear Iran cannot be contained; but it's a more dicey proposition that involves making deals with other powers, and compromises with other interests, that we might rather not make.

In short, it's worth going to some trouble to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands. The question is, how much trouble?

Which leads us back to those other three proposed responses to the news that the Iranians may soon be producing highly enriched uranium, which would put them on the road to building the stuff of nuclear bombs.

First, it's worth pointing out that they're not at that point yet, and they seem to be experiencing technical problems in getting there. Second, if they do cross that point—that is, once they've enriched their uranium to the level of 20 percent—it will take a year or more to enrich it further to the 80 percent or 90 percent needed to build bombs. Third, if they get to that point, it's another matter still to turn the material into bombs and then to fashion and miniaturize the bomb to fit onto a missile. This is rocket science.

In other words, the situation is not quite as urgent as some advocates for each of the options are suggesting. There's still time to see how things in Iran pan out—politically, socially, and economically as well as technologically.

Launching an attack on Iran's facilities is a bad idea, especially if it's done with no concrete evidence that the Iranians can build a bomb, much less that they're about to do so. An airstrike or commando raid would only consolidate the regime's power. (There's nothing like a foreign attack to rally domestic support for a beleaguered regime.)

At the same time, diplomatic engagement seems futile, mainly because there's nobody over there to engage. Or, if some officials do want to engage, they're swiftly overruled by other officials who don't. (This happened a few months ago, when Iran announced that it would agree to export its uranium to be enriched abroad, as the United States and Russia had proposed—only to backpedal soon after.) The only reason for President Barack Obama to keep proposing talks (and it's a good reason) is so he can say that he tried diplomacy if and when the time comes.

As for sanctions, they're tricky, especially at a time when mass movements are protesting a government we're trying to pressure. Sanctions are crude; they punish the population as brutally as the government, when what we ought to be doing is seeking ways to aggravate the split between the Iranian people and their rulers. Several Western countries are imposing targeted sanctions—for instance, cutting off trade with companies owned by the Revolutionary Guard. This is very much worth doing, though it would be more effective if China could be persuaded to join in. Whether that's possible, given China's mercantilist approach to foreign policy, is up in the air.

Regime change would be nice, though a few things are worth noting. First, since we can't really engage with the Iranian government right now, it might be a good idea to declare our sympathies with the rebels and demand an end to their torture and imprisonment more openly.

However, material assistance to these rebels (whether overt or badly disguised covert) will only make things worse, especially in Iran, where memories of 1953—the year the CIA helped overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh and install the shah—remain strong and politically exploitable. (When Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's secretary of state, publicly announced that the administration was budgeting $75 million to help Iranian rebels, many of those rebels moaned, knowing that they stood a higher chance of arrest for being CIA spies.)

Finally, even if democratic, pro-Western reformers took over the Iranian government, they would almost certainly continue to enrich uranium—though not necessarily to make A-bombs. It's become, due in part to all the outside pressure, an issue of national pride.

So to prepare for that day, or for some other moment when an opportunity for negotiations arises, we should figure out what the goal of those talks ought to be—an end to enrichment (not likely) or strict limits on enrichment, to keep them from turning the uranium into a weapon (likelier but very hard to verify, especially with a hostile regime).

The real frustration about this whole issue, the reason why even reasonable people are flirting with actions that are dangerous or futile, is that, ultimately, we have little control over what happens next. It's an extreme case of what we've experienced across much of the world since the fracturing of power that followed the end of the Cold War. It's something we haven't yet grown used to.

Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Complaining for the sake of complaining - Andrew Sprung captures the latest vintage of Congressional Republican whine

If we're supposed to take seriously the constant whining by the Congressional Republicans and the right-wing media echo-chamber, can't they at least keep their whining consistent?

Yes, I know that bald-faced hypocrisy and unembarrassed inconsistency are business as usual in the partisan wars, so one more example isn't really news. And furthermore--I feel it's necessary to keep repeating this--it would be wrong to suggest that Republicans and right-wingers have a monopoly on political dishonesty, hypocrisy, and the constant regurgitation of partisan talking-points so transparently insincere that they constitute a real insult to our intelligence. But it's also necessary to add that anyone who pretends that there is anything resembling moral equivalence in this respect nowadays between Republicans and Democrats is simply not facing reality (and/or is a Republican propagandist).

Since I know that even some intelligent and well-intentioned people are unwilling to face this reality, occasional concrete examples are useful to help remind us just how seriously we should take the Congressional Republicans' talking-points-of-the-hour. Andrew Sprung (who blogs at XPOSTFACTOID) just picked up a nicely illuminating example.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
Andrew Sprung (XPOSTFACTOID)
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Talking points m.o.

Remember this from John Boehner and Eric Cantor, in a letter to Rahm Emanuel dated Feb. 8?
If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?Our ability to move forward in a bipartisan way through this discussion rests on openness and transparency.
Different times, different circumstances, I guess, today:
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) criticized the White House's plan to post a health care reform proposal online, just days before the upcoming health care summit. "You know, apparently we're going to be there most of the day and have an opportunity to have a lot of discussion," said McConnell. "But if they're going lay out the plan they want to pass four days in advance, then why are -- what are we discussing on Thursday?"
I realize that these guys are, technically, different people. But a party line is a party line, especially if you're a Republican. They need to get their (bull)shit together.

Related posts:
Calling Boehner Cantor et al
The earth beneath their feet: Obama recasts health care reform
Aghanistan redux: Obama's HCR surge
Obama picks "none of the above" again
A gallon of water at bedtime for bedwetters: Obama's HCR prescription
How Obama will -- and won't -- lead on health care

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Why I have never been tempted to activate the "comments" feature on my blog

Perhaps I'm being unfair or excessively finicky to say this, but my impression from reading blogs for almost a decade is that, as a general rule, the "comments" threads on most blogs tend to be dominated by junk that is useless at best--and often worse than that, since it's common for them to fill up with mindless ranting and vituperation. There are occasional exceptions, and some blogs with well-established constituencies even manage to generate intelligent discussions in the "comments" threads. But, even for those blogs, keeping things from getting out of hand usually requires persistent and draconian policing of the "comments" to weed out postings and posters that go over the line (trolls, obsessives, bigots, conspiracy theorists, outright loonies, and so on). That strikes me as more time-consuming than it's worth, though I can appreciate why other bloggers might feel differently.

If people really want to tell me something in response to something I've posted, they can (and occasionally do) manage to find my e-mail address and send me a message. Why make it easier for them? The need to go through that extra bit of trouble is usually enough to weed out most of the crazies.

=> Though not always ... Let me draw on the experience of another blogger (more big-time than yours truly) to illustrate.

From time to time, Jeffrey Goldberg has shared some examples from the stream of hostile e-mail messages, ranging from abusive to semi-deranged, that prominent & controversialist bloggers like him attract. And that's just e-mail traffic. His blog doesn't take "comments" either, but in blogs with "comments" threads, the volume and intensity of this sort of stuff increases exponentially.

Here are a few illustrative examples picked at random (from here & here ). Plenty more where they came from, and I suspect that Goldberg isn't sharing the more demented, illiterate, and morally obscene kinds of e-mail attacks he gets, but these convey the basic flavor:
It is embarrassing that you use a Jewish surname as camouflage for your pathological hostility towards Hebrews.

How much would it take for you to change your last name to "Goebbels"?

Although, I am a Goy with opposing perspectives from your own I hope you are able to avoid forwarding my contact information to Zionist monitoring networks/agencies as well as distributing my comments to third parties. Thanks.
And for a more thoughtful and nuanced analysis:
Mr Goldberg,
I know thinking outside your shallow, Zionist ideologies and prejudices may at times be quite difficult for you but I urge you to try in the instance of you challenging C-SPAN. It's quite uncouth for you to peddle such vitriolic "journalism" against such a shining flagship for open and free media for and by the people of AMERICA (not Israel). Essentially I just want to let you know I find your condemnation of the freedom of C-SPAN to be quite disgusting. I guess you and your kind won't rest until ALL of television is pro-Israel, Zionist controlled, ADL garbage. Too bad you guys couldn't just settle for 99%. Why don't you start writing pissy, poorly written articles every time the Arab world and the Islamic world are bastardized in the media? Oh wait. I know; it's because you are a mean, racist, Zionist Jew who turns his head to the same injustices of groups other than your own. Besides your miniscule readership of flaming Zionists, I'm afraid not many are caring for or about what you say.
=> Well, as my mother used to say to me, "Why dwell on the negative?" Many of the e-mail messages I get in response to posts on my own blog are intelligent and illuminating--I've occasionally posted selections from them, with permission--even when the person writing me is indignant about something I've said that he or she thinks is idiotic and/or morally reprehensible. I sometimes get e-mail messages from loonies, too, but I'll just let you guess about those. However, here is one characterization of my world-view that was once posted as a "comment" on someone else's blog:
I also think that Weintraub and Geras [JW: that's Norman Geras, with whom I'm always proud to be associated, even for purposes of mindless defamation] ought to, rather than pussyfooting around with hypotheticals, make it clear that their current position is that Senator Joseph McCarthy was right on the facts (that a large proportion of the American left in the 1930s were active apologists for Stalinism and formed a fifth column in the USA) right on his reaction to those facts (to take action to blacklist and jail them in large numbers) and that his methods ought to be followed today. I'm not using "McCarthyite" as a simple political insult here; it seems pretty clear to me that this is the exact same position that Senator Joe occupied; I regard that as decent prima facie evidence of its lunacy but others don't.
Sure, I've always held "the exact same position" as Joe McCarthy, especially the bit about blacklisting and jailing people I don't like. As for "lunacy"--well, it takes one to know one. There's enough of this poisonous bullshit floating around already. Why encourage or facilitate more of it?

Yours for reality-based discourse
& some minimal degree of political sanity,
Jeff Weintraub

Assured access to health care helps make people healthier (continued)

Following up the mini-controversy touched on here last week, J. Michael McWilliams ("MD, PhD, assistant professor of health care policy and of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate physician in the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital") reviews the range of evidence currently available from both experimental and observational studies and concludes:
To date, numerous studies have found consistently beneficial and often significant effects of insurance coverage on health across a comprehensive set of outcomes and a broad range of treatable chronic and acute conditions that affect many adults in the U.S., including hypertension, coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, diabetes, HIV infection, depressive symptoms, acute myocardial infarction, acute respiratory illnesses, and traumatic injuries (McWilliams 2009). In particular, several studies have robustly demonstrated positive effects of near-universal Medicare coverage after age 65 on self-reported health outcomes and clinical measures of disease control, particular for adults with cardiovascular disease or diabetes who make up two-thirds of the near-elderly (Decker and Remler 2004; McWilliams et al. 2007, 2009). Thus, when rigorous study designs have been coupled with appropriate outcomes and applied to clinical populations for whom medical care is effective, the evidence that insurance coverage improves health and survival is consistent and convincing.

How many lives would universal coverage save each year? A rigorous body of research tells us the answer is many, probably thousands if not tens of thousands. Short of the perfect study, however, we will never know the exact number. In the meantime, we can let perfect be the enemy of good. Or we can recognize the evidence to date is sufficiently robust for policymakers to proceed confidently with health care reforms that promise substantial health and financial benefits for millions of uninsured Americans.
Whether or not we can manage to do this is a moral test for us as a society. As a friend pointed out in December, important as the technical details of policy options and the dynamics of the political maneuvering may be, we should not let them distract us from the moral heart of the matter:
a decent affluent society ensures that all its people can get adequate health care and doesn't make this a matter of individual resources or accidents.
The first step in this direction, clearly, is to Pass The Damn Bill.

--Jeff Weintraub